Every factory floor generates thousands of data points every second — cycle counts, temperatures, pressures, alarm states, energy consumption, material flow, machine status. The vast majority of this data is thrown away. Factory floor analytics is the discipline of capturing that data, extracting intelligence from it, and using that intelligence to make better manufacturing decisions. Here's how it works in practice.

Your machines are talking. The question is whether you're listening. Equipment health monitoring transforms raw machine data into actionable intelligence — telling you not just what your equipment is doing right now, but predicting what it will do next. For manufacturers losing 5-20% of productive capacity to unplanned downtime, the difference between monitoring and not monitoring is often the difference between profit and loss.

Every maintenance manager eventually faces this question: should we invest in a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) or a predictive maintenance platform? The answer in 2026 isn't one or the other — it's understanding what each does, where they overlap, and why the gap between them is where manufacturing plants lose money.

Ignition by Inductive Automation has been a favorite among manufacturing engineers for over a decade — a powerful, developer-friendly SCADA platform with an unlimited licensing model. MachineCDN is a cloud-native IIoT platform that connects to PLCs in minutes. Both give you visibility into your machines, but they represent two different eras of industrial software. Here's what matters for your decision.

Tulip and MachineCDN both serve manufacturers, but they solve fundamentally different problems. Tulip is a no-code platform for building custom manufacturing apps. MachineCDN is a protocol-native IIoT platform for machine monitoring, predictive maintenance, and factory intelligence. Understanding where each platform excels — and where it doesn't belong — is critical to making the right investment.

Honeywell Forge is the enterprise IIoT platform from one of the world's largest industrial conglomerates. MachineCDN is a purpose-built manufacturing intelligence platform focused on rapid deployment and comprehensive factory visibility. Both serve industrial customers — but they serve them very differently. Here's what manufacturing engineers and plant managers need to know.

IoTFlows has positioned itself as an AI-powered industrial monitoring platform backed by Y Combinator, promising to reduce downtime through vibration and acoustic analysis. But does the reality match the pitch? After examining their platform capabilities, customer feedback, and competitive positioning, here's an honest assessment for manufacturing engineers evaluating IoTFlows in 2026.

If you're evaluating IoTFlows for your manufacturing operation, the first question is obvious: what does it actually cost? Unlike traditional software purchases where you pay a license fee and move on, IoTFlows combines proprietary hardware with cloud subscriptions — and that dual-cost model deserves careful examination before you commit.

In plastics manufacturing, your product is only as good as the material feeding it. A $500,000 injection molding press running $3/lb engineering resin can produce flawless parts — or expensive scrap — depending entirely on whether the right material, at the right moisture content, at the right blend ratio, arrives at the barrel at the right time.

Yet material management remains one of the least instrumented, most manually-dependent processes in the typical plastics factory. Operators check hopper levels by tapping on the side and listening. Dryer dewpoint gets verified once per shift — maybe. Regrind ratios are "about 20%" based on someone's best guess. And contamination? That gets caught when customers start rejecting parts.

The gap between how materials should be managed and how they actually are managed represents one of the largest hidden cost drivers in plastics processing — typically 3–8% of total material cost, which for a facility processing 5 million pounds of resin annually at $1.50/lb average, means $225,000–$600,000 per year in preventable waste.

Electricity doesn't just power a plastics factory — it defines its profitability. For most plastics processors, energy represents 20–30% of total manufacturing cost, second only to raw resin. Yet the vast majority of plants have no visibility into where those kilowatt-hours actually go. The utility bill arrives, someone winces, and everyone moves on.

That approach worked when energy was cheap. In 2026, with industrial electricity rates climbing past $0.12/kWh in many regions and sustainability reporting becoming a procurement requirement, ignorance isn't bliss — it's margin erosion.

Per-machine energy monitoring changes the equation entirely. When you can see exactly how many kWh each injection molding press, extruder, or auxiliary system consumes per pound of resin processed, you stop guessing and start optimizing.